Hey, I Remember This Show: Scooby Doo, Where Are You!

Long before Carl Kolchak, Mulder and Scully, the Ghostbusters or the Buffy gang, there was that intrepid debunker of supernatural fiends, Scooby Doo. There have been several incarnations of this heroic character's show but this is the first and the most famous one.

Hey, I Don't Remember This Show: The Addams Family (1973-1975)

I remember a cartoon version of The Addams Family making a guest appearance on Scooby-Doo but I forgot that they also had their own cartoon show as well. Indeed, they also had a cartoon series in the 1990s shortly after the success of the first Addams Family movie. However, this is the version I would have seen when I was a teenager.

Hey, I Remember This Show: Groovie Goolies

Yet another attempt to exploi -- er -- adapt classic movie monsters for the children of a new generation. Orginally linked with Sabrina the Teenage Witch, the Goolies eventually got their own solo series in the early 1970s. However, they were never as popular as either The Archies, the show on which Sabrina first appeared, or Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!, the most popular animated series with a horror theme back in the 1970s.

Perhaps it was just as well. The harder people back in the day tried to update the old-time movie monsters, the more anachronistic they seemed in the long run. And really? A hippie werewolf? Perhaps Abbott and Costello weren't so bad after all.

Hey, I Don't Remember This Show: Drak Pack

A trio of teenagers descended from classic movie monsters decide to redeem themselves by becoming superheroes in this animated TV series from the early 1980s. And to think that all this time, I thought "Drak Pack" was a term invented by Marv Wolfman to describe the team of vampire hunters in Marvel's old Tomb of Dracula comic book series.

Hey, I Remember This Show: Milton the Monster

Oddly enough, this was one of the first Saturday morning cartoons I ever remember seeing as a kid. Until YouTube came along, I was beginning to think I had imagined this odd intro.



Of course, that intro seems almost normal compared to this one.

Hey, I Don't Remember This Show: Count Duckula

How did I ever miss out on a show like this? I suppose "just lucky, I guess" would not quite be the right answer...

Hey, I Remember This Show: Point Pleasant

Since writer Marti Noxon is back in fashion nowadays, it only seems appropriate to post an intro from the TV series which first made her famous. However, I would rather post this intro instead.

Hey, I Don't Remember This Show: The Vampire Diaries

What? Yet another primetime TV series about vampires? Why do I get the feeling that this one is not based on the old Robert Aickman story "Pages from a Young Girl's Journal"?

Hey, I Don't Remember This Show: Dark Skies

Ah, 1996. That was the year almost every other sci-fi buff worth his or her salt was watching The X-Files -- and almost nobody was watching this. No doubt because of the aliens.

Hey, I Remember This Show: Medium

Speaking of dead TV shows...My heart really goes out to Patricia Arquette and the rest of the cast of Medium this week. It's not like we need more people in the unemployment line at this time of year. And anyway, the few episodes of this show which I've seen never struck me as being all that bad. Some day soon I hope to start blogging about individual episodes.

Hey, I Remember This Show: Kolchak: The Night Stalker

This used to be one of my favorite TV shows back in the 1970s but you know, you live, you grow.

Seriously, I still have a soft spot for the series and while I will admit time has not been kind to its premise -- especially after young whippersnappers like Fox Mulder and Buffy Summers started stealing the title character's thunder -- it still holds up better than the recent remake effort. Plus, there is a part of me that still has a soft spot for the late Darren McGavin. Granted, he will never look as good in a short skirt as Sarah Michelle Gellar but then none of the male members of the Buffy cast could ever hope to look as good in that white suit.

Hey, I Don't Remember This Show: Dracula: The Series (1990)

Wait a minute! We don't not only got a Dark Shadows revival in 1991 but we also got a series based on the most famous vampire of all? (Actually this show started in 1990 but the latter half of it aired in 1991.)

I guess Anne Rice had more influence in the early 1990s than I figured.

Hey, I Remember This Show: Night Gallery

The last TV series on which the late Rod Serling worked and unfortunately, the one which gave him the most trouble. It says something about his dedication that it actually produced some good stories -- for example, the Emmy-winning “They're Tearing Down Tim Riley's Bar.” Unfortunately, it also produced a lot of stories which were best not remembered.

I still have a fondness for most of the better stories -- if nothing else, the series introduced me to both author H.P. Lovecraft and actress Joanna Pettet -- but I wish for Mr. Serling's sake that the ratio of good stories to bad had been a lot more favorable. Then again some of those stories still haunt my dreams so they obviously had some effect even if it was not one Mr. Serling would have preferred.

Hey, I Don't Remember This Show: Night Visions

A short-lived horror anthology which had the bad luck to debut in July 2001. Call me a cynic, but I'm guessing any horror anthology series would have found a tough audience after September 2001.

Hey, I Don't Remember This Show: Dark Shadows (1991)

Apparently the TV powers that be liked Dark Shadows so much that they tried to bring it back in 1991 -- only to abandon it when it failed to produce the same audience as the original. I must confess that I'm a bit surprised to see the late Jean Simmons of Angel Face fame playing the Joan Bennett role this time out. I am even more surprised to see '60s horror goddess Barbara Steele playing the Grayson Hall part. I suppose she thought it a more dignified way to end her horror career than her part as a middle-aged psycho killer in 1980's Silent Scream.

Hey, I Remember This Show: Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased)

Given the number of horror films the late Roy Ward Baker directed for Hammer and Amicus, one would think that he would have done at least one show with a Halloweenish theme. However, two episodes of this was the closest he ever came. Probably just as well. The poor man probably didn't want to be typecast.

Anyway, this show was released in the U.S. under the title My Partner the Ghost but I didn't catch up with it until about a year ago. There was a more recent version made about a decade ago but for some reason, I found this one more watchable. Of course, it doesn't hurt that this one has a more memorable theme.

Hey, I Don't Remember This Show: Friday the 13th

I really did not want to post this the day before my sister's birthday but hey, it is that day. And I actually did not watch this show when it first came out -- perhaps because I was all burnt-out on horror shows at the time.

Hey, I Remember This Show: The Twilight Zone

It is the one TV show every fantasy and sci-fi buff discovers sooner or later, even if it is on late night television. I'm referring, of course, to Rod Serling's classic anthology series The Twilight Zone.

The first season's opening credit sequence always struck me as dreamlike -- as if the composer was in the middle of a dream when he wrote the music for it. But it does not have the music most people associate with this series.



That music came with the second season.



The third season used the same music but different visuals.



The opening credits sequence for the fourth and fifth seasons was the one I remembered most for some reason. Perhaps it was that strange door. Or the many times I tried to figure out what the strange object was that appeared from the upper right hand corner after Einstein's famous equation.

In the long run, it does not really matter. They were all worth watching.

Hey, I Remember This Show: The Addams Family

In honor of the late Vic Mizzy, the opening credits to a show with which most of my generation is quite familiar.

This used to be one of my late father's favorite shows. Or at least he watched it a lot and preferred it to The Munsters.

And speaking of The Munsters, anyone else ever think it was strange that American TV viewers got so many sit-coms about weird neighbors during the same time that racial integration was a major concern in this country? I'd like to think that any connection is either a coincidence or a positive development. Perhaps the good folks in TVland meant to suggest that if we could get used to a Gomez Addams or a Herman Munster, we should have no problem with a black family moving in down the street. Then again, not every sane person wants to live next door to a Gomez Addams or a Herman Munster. And it did seem rather ominous that one rarely saw blacks or Hispanics on these shows.

But maybe I'm overthinking this a bit too much.

I hope you all enjoy the video.

Hey, I Remember This Show: Dark Shadows

My babysitter used to watch this show during its first run when I was a child. I still remember being haunted by one scene in which a woman seemed to be melting into nothing against a background of fire but I suspect my childhood imagination took that scene out of context. Then later on when I was a teenager, a local TV station showed reruns of it and I got hooked again.

It's a bit slow by modern standards, but when I was a kid, this show was the closest thing we had to Buffy or Angel. I even remember having a crush as a teenager on Alexandra Moltke, the woman who played the governess Victoria Winters. But that was a long, long time ago.